Weekend Breakfast with Africa

After seeing how people were getting frustrated with contracts and their complex nature, Cape Town lawyer Robert de Rooy started working on making contracts easy to understand.

De Rooy has now developed the worlds first contract using pictures to help people better understand what they are agreeing to.

Contracts are documents written by lawyers for lawyers and if you someone of low literacy it is virtually impossible to understand

— Robert de Rooy, lawyer

De Rooy says he started working on this project about three years ago. He says people who were pioneering visualisation in contracts always insisted that visualisation is only there to compliment the text, and the text remains the binding part.

Living in South Africa with all the challenges of illiteracy and different languages, I just felt that this is unfair.

— Robert de Rooy, lawyer

The contracts developed by de Rooy have no text in them but only pictures and he says they are legally binding.